With their tight, modern sound and their dynamic, groovy, yet very aggressive death metal songs, Sick Feel is a stand-out band among the contemporary Venezuelan metal scene. Vocalist Joel Miranda and guitarist Siro Tagliaferro share some insights into the creation of the Sick Feel sound and their ambitions for the near future.

“The funny thing about Sick Feel is that everybody listens to something different”, Miranda says. “Which is crazy, because most of the time when you’re in a band, you’re with the same type of people that listen to the same genre of music. In my case, I just love nu-metal music. That’s my generation: Limp Bizkit, Korn, Linkin Park… But I also love Gothenburg bands. I love At the Gates and In Flames. So that’s kind of my combination.

Also, my uncle is Ali Miranda from Necrofago, and he is kind of my second father. He taught me everything I knew about metal music. He showed me everything. Then, around 2000, I started to love the new sound of nu-metal music. That’s when I started thinking about having a band. That was the first time I met with some people who started learning their instruments, and we thought: okay, let’s go!”

“I have always loved djent”, Tagliaferro adds. “I listen to Meshuggah and Gojira a lot, but also Children of Bodom and Blind Guardian. I love Pestilence from the Netherlands. I had the opportunity to travel and see several festivals. I went to Bloodstock to finally see Gojira live. I wanted to see them several years ago, but I have finally seen them now. Igorrr is another act I love, because they combine all these different elements of other music. It’s so interesting and innovative within metal music.”

A Book for Life

“There are plenty of excellent guitar players in Venezuela”, Tagliaferro says. “But they aren’t metal players. If you want to learn how to play metal guitar, you have to learn it by yourself. Several guitarists have taught me how to play – how to use different techniques when I pick, several techniques for the left and right hand – but no one showed me how to play a gallop. That’s something I had to teach myself.

Fortunately, Joel’s uncle Ali showed me the correct way to play gallops. That is the most important guitar lesson I had in my life. Later, I had to learn by myself, seeing other guitarists play, like Tosin Abasi and John Petrucci; the best book I bought for myself is a score book by John Petrucci. It’s my book for life. It taught me everything I know about guitars.

As a guitar player, I have been very inspired by Alexi Laiho. I learned about several techniques thanks to Children of Bodom. And not just how to play: they taught me how to compose, how to create a song. That’s another problem in Venezuela: there are very good technique and theory lessons, but there isn’t anyone to teach you how to compose a song.”

“There also is nobody like Melissa Cross in this country”, Miranda adds. “Or people like that who can teach you how to do growls, screams and these types of things. I studied a little bit of singing, but that was all clean vocals. So same story: I started to growl by myself, and then I got the chance to take some courses.”

Experimenting with Different Sounds and Styles

“Sick Feel has been around since 2006”, Miranda explains. “We started with the idea of just doing something as friends. And then, everything went from being friends in a band for fun to doing something serious. To playing shows, big shows, and doing tours, and things like that.

When we started out, we didn’t know what we wanted to do. We were just experimenting with different sounds and styles. We tried to have a rapper in the band, like Linkin Park, but it didn’t work. It was terrible. Honestly. And then we changed into hardcore. Something like Hatebreed. And then we changed into what we are now, which is a combination between groove metal and melodic death metal.

We started with a guy named José Francisco on the drums, Fernando Morales on lead guitar, and myself. On bass was Fenando’s sister. Something people remember from our old days is that our drummer after José, Adriana Ríos, was a girl. That was a little different, because twenty years ago, you didn’t see extreme metal bands with a woman all that often.

Then we changed when Siro came, and other new people came. This line-up has been together for about fourteen years. We’ve only changed drummers recently. Our new drummer is only 23 years old, but he plays like crazy, man. He was going on tour with a different band in Europe last year, and then he arrived in Venezuela, and he finally played with us officially.

We have been through a lot of changes. We have had more than twenty people in the band, and I’m the only one who is still there with the beginning, along with our bass player Adrian De Abreu, who has been with us for sixteen years or something like that.”

Like Making a Thesis

Songwriting in Sick Feel is a very collaborative process. “We have sessions in which we compose our songs”, Tagliaferro explains. “There are usually ideas to change some chords, some vocal parts, and we have to make a mix of everyone’s suggestions. Several of our songs have had multiple versions before we finally arrive at the final version.”

“Like one thousand different versions until it was finally done”, Miranda smiles. “It’s like making a thesis, man. You start with something, and then all of a sudden, you want to change everything. So that’s what happens. Everybody comes up with different ideas, and then we have to put everything together.

Daniel (Nuñez, sampler, co-vocalist and former rhythm guitarist) helps us a lot in order to create something like a big filter to put all of those ideas into to make sense. Because that’s the most important thing to us: to have a strong chorus, a strong verse, a solo that makes sense. So to practically organize all the ideas we have as a band: that’s where Daniel is very helpful.”

“Daniel helped us helped us build our skills in order to make new music for Sick Feel”, Tagliaferro nods. “Everything we have now is thanks to him.”

A Very Small Market

“We invest a lot of money into the band”, Miranda says. “These days, we work with a promotion company in Germany called Wolf Entertainment. They pay us for the music we make, and with the money we make from our music, we buy instruments and equipment. That’s how we try to develop a better sound, to have better recording sessions, in order for us to improve as a band. We use different tools to try and maintain a proper sound.

I always say to the guys that the most important thing is to find your own personal color, your own personal attitude when it comes to music, so when people listen to Sick Feel, they know: okay, this is Joel singing, this is Siro playing. And that’s really difficult. There are bands where you listen to one riff, and you already know who they are. For example: Gojira, Machine Head… And that is really difficult to achieve in the metal world these days.”

“The problem here in Venezuela is that there is a very small market to buy instruments”, Tagliaferro adds. “Fortunately, we had the opportunity to travel outside of Venezuela. For example: I traveled to Spain several times, because my family is from Spain. Every time I visit my family, I have the opportunity to buy strings, sticks, cables, things like that. Otherwise, we would have been at the mercy of our instrument market, which is very slow.”

Sounding Like a Monster

“On stage, we work with the same plug-ins we use on the record”, Tagliaferro continues. “This is a big advantage for us, because a lot of venues in Venezuela have a problem with their equipment. Their backlines are often very bad, or at the very least, they require maintenance. Using the plug-ins on our laptop, we have solved the problem. Because that way, we can deliver the exact same sound live as on the record.”

“Also, you need to be super-prepared to play live here”, Miranda emphasizes. “Because you never know what to expect. Since about two years ago, we have changed the sound that we take with us on stage. Taking these plug-ins with us is very common for bands all around the world, but here in Venezuela, it’s not all that common. Not all bands have samplers, for example. Not all bands use plug-ins. Many musicians here are more like old school guys, like in Necrofago, where they just want to plug in and play.

These days, the metal scene has changed a lot. That is the reason why we bring our laptop to maintain the sound that we used for the recording sessions of the album on stage. Because in the end, people pay for a ticked to hear you sound like a monster. That’s the whole idea. We try to take that sound to the stage in order to offer the best performance possible.

We have a lot of tools that bands from the nineties – like Krueger, Natastor and Necrofago – didn’t have. This is something we need to start learning. Some bands have actually been learning over the past few years. Before Siro came in, we were more old school as well. But I think the Venezuelan metal movement needs to learn, so we can improve to the point of international metal band.”

Preparing a Customized Sound for the Band

“You can’t create your own sound by using exactly the same distortion as Lamb of God”, Miranda states. “Obviously, there are some presets that the plug-ins can give you, but what Daniel and Siro do is prepare a customized sound for the band. They try to make us sound like the sound we are looking for.”

“You can have all the effects you want, and you can make effects of your own”, Tagliaferro adds. “But you have to experiment to find out how to use it. You have to decide which effect is the perfect one for a song, and know how to put the right sound into the song. And because you have to do that for every song, it takes time. When Daniel and I are making the sounds, we’re working on sounds for multiple days: changing, recording, improving… It’s an experiment.”

“These guys are crazy when it comes to looking for new sounds for the band”, Miranda laughs. “If you check out all our albums, you can hear that there is a big difference between our first record (‘Sick Society’, 2016) and ‘The Rat Race’ (2024). A lot of bands want to tell you their latest record is their best, but honestly: I think ‘The Rat Race’ is our best record when it comes to sound. I feel really comfortable with the result of that record.

I love our 2020 album ‘Chapters of Hate’. I think it’s one of my favorite records, because the sound has something special for us for that year. It was the pandemic situation, and it was not easy to record. But we were looking to improve the sound. ‘The Rat Race’, for me, increases the level of everything else that we have done in the past.”

A Lot to Write About

A majority of Sick Feel’s lyrics are in English. “We try to have at least one Spanish-language song on every record”, Miranda emphasizes. “On ‘The Rat Race’, there is ‘Arrastrarse’. We have three voices there: myself, Daniel, and a guy named Dorian Vélez. And Daniel came up with the idea of doing ‘Discípulo’. Because he’s crazy. All of a sudden, he says: Could you imagine Slayer in Spanish? No? Well, let’s do it! He created it as an experiment first, and it sounded really good, so we decided to include it on ‘The Rat Race’.

But when it comes to the language… I’m an English teacher, so I try to apply what I know. The lyrics are also very personal. We try to write about what we live in. You know, we live in Venezuela, so we have a lot to write about. It could be political stuff, it could be things related to society. ‘Sick Society’, which was the first LP we had, talks about the situation in Venezuela in 2016. We try to write about things we know, as a common citizen from this country.

It’s not that we feel an obligation to sing about Venezuelan things. There are also songs related to our personal lives. I have a brother who suffers from autism. There is a song on ‘Chapters of Hate’ called ‘Surreal Host’, about the inner struggle he has to express himself. That’s the type of stuff that we put out there for everybody. Metal doesn’t have to be pretty all the time.”

The New Objective

Ever the ambitious band, Sick Feel is already looking at new improvements to make for the future. “We have to find a new sound an write new songs”, Tagliaferro says. “For this year, I have gotten in contact with some marketing specialists. We have to improve our numbers on Spotify when we want to release new music. We came into contact with an agency to put us into several production lists in the US, Asia, India, China… To get new fans. The new objective is to get more fans from other parts of the world.”

“We’re also going to have our twentieth anniversary this year”, Miranda adds. “Maybe we’re going to celebrate it with other bands, and play a big show. Maybe a couple of concerts. I don’t know if we’re going to play a lot next year, because we need to record, and we take things very seriously when it comes to recording music, because we don’t want to release something that we don’t feel comfortable with.

That typically takes between five and six months. One time, for the first LP, it took like eleven months. Can you imagine? And we were learning. We were in that process. Right now, the good thing is: we’ve got the experience that we had with ‘The Rat Race’. So that will help us in order to find a better sound quicker, and we can hopefully do it in less than six months.”

Developing a Bigger Fanbase

“After that, one of the first goals when it comes to Sick feel, beside developing a bigger fanbase, is to play in other countries”, Miranda says. “We’re thinking of Colombia. We’re thinking about going to Argentina. But we have to see what’s going to happen, and whether the chance we get to play somewhere else next year. We need to tour at some point to show Sick Feel to the rest of South America and other parts of the world.

Last year, a couple of Venezuelan bands have played at big festivals in Colombia. Our friends of Hecatombe also played in Colombia. So for us, the first step to play abroad is probably Colombia. They are our neighbors. The problem right now is that we can’t always decide where to play, and the money can be an issue too.

Until the opportunity arrives, we are going to record. We will be inside the studio, doing what we love, trying to create better music. I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but we’re going to try to improve upon ‘The Rat Race’. And I think that’s going to be pretty difficult.”